This wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The trailer was pretty boring and the reviews are pretty terrible, but I thought it was decent. It does kind of have that feeling like if the first and last few minutes were removed or altered, it could have been an entirely different movie with no connection to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it was alright for what it was. Dark, disturbing, and a pretty generous amount of good quality gore effects. Did this series really need yet another origin/reboot chapter, and is this latest entry going to finally revitalize the brand? Probably not to both, but oh well.

I remember this being on tv a lot when I was a kid, so I thought I’d revisit it. Eh, it’s pretty bad. Not nearly as bad as the ultra-abysmal original Ghoulies, because that’s an extremely low bar to reach, but it’s still a pretty poor 80’s horror movie. The creature design is passable for its time, but the story, characters, and death scenes are all pretty underwhelming. Watching it now, that ending doesn’t really make sense either. I remembered them getting the giant creature at the end to swallow a dummy with a bomb in it to defeat it, but now that I see it again, it was actually a molotov cocktail that just had a cloth fuse sticking clearly out of the eye of the dummy. That was their plan? To just hope that that thing stayed lit, even when a giant demon thing swallows it? And then it makes him explode like it was made of dynamite. It just seems so silly now.

Now the big ape moment that we’ve all been waiting for. What people have been calling the most amazing ape movie ever and one of the best movies of the year. Eh. It was decent, but I actually thought it was the least interesting of the 3 recent apes movies (not including Burton Apes at all in that of course, because that never happened!). Just like the previous two, the characters and effects were great, but this one felt a lot less consistently paced than the first two. The majority of the movie focused on a small handful of characters, who spent most of the time just talking, and don’t get me wrong, the script was still well-written enough for even the slowest parts to be entertaining, but I was a little surprised at just how little war there was in a movie with this name.

You know, it sure strikes me as strange too, that this movie was so highly praised and financially successful, even though it’s so long, dialogue heavy (it even has subtitles half the time!), and action light. Why is it that this met with such mainstream success when everyone seemed to hate Blade Runner 2049 for the same reasons? Beats me.

70’s horror just doesn’t do it for me most of the time, but you never know. There are some occasional gems to be found there. This isn’t one of them. Not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, but just too dated and slow to be entertaining.

Another one that I used to watch a ton when I was a kid. I didn’t expect this to hold up at all either, but it’s actually still pretty funny. It’s absolutely ridiculous and implausible, the kind of goofy-ass nonsense that could only succeed in the 80’s, but somehow it still works more often than it doesn’t. Of course half the fun is also laughing at how terrible it is. It’s terrible in the best way though. Fun times.

Arghhhh. I tried and tried to like this. I’m a huge fan of ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., but this is just awful. The quality of the writing took a huge nosedive in the third episode and I couldn’t make it through the fourth. It’s just so terrible and cliche-packed. It’s like a bad cartoon. I give up. Just bring back Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.!

Wait, let me sneak a few more bonus things on here…

Another Netflix Stephen King adaptation. I guess they’re really reaching for un-adapted Stephen King works these days, huh? Thomas Jane and friends put in a good performance and there are some nice effects, but it’s a pretty slow and dreary tale. Man kills wife, man regrets it and goes kind of nutty. Eh. It was ok, but I doubt I’d ever watch it again.

Wow. This is so very bad. Painfully bad script and dialogue. What’s with the pop up text? Was that supposed to be emulating internet memes? Who is this movie for? I feel like this is aimed kids in high school or under, yet it’s rated for ages 17 and up. I guess I just don’t get it. This is just an incredibly unfunny movie with no redeeming qualities to it, except I guess the cinematography was decent enough. Big slow clap for that.